BlackBerry Q5 – 4G Phone

The BlackBerry Q5 is a mid-range handset providing a more affordable alternative to the BlackBerry Q10. Being mid-range this QWERTY phone has a distinctly plastic build, but looks aren’t everything and for most users it should be more than adequate.

Blackberry Q5

The BlackBerry Q5 only has a 3.1 inch 720 x 720 touchscreen, but of course that’s to make room for the QWERTY keyboard below it. Size aside it’s a reasonable quality screen too, with a decent pixel density of 328 pixels per inch.

Under the hood there’s a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. That’s a good amount of RAM for a mid-range phone and a reasonable processor too.

There’s only 8GB of storage built in but BlackBerry has seen fit to include a micro SD card slot, so there’s no need to be limited by that.

The BlackBerry Q5 runs the company’s latest operating system- BlackBerry 10 and while it’s arguably primarily aimed at business users, the BlackBerry Q5 hasn’t forgotten to include other features, as it has a 5 megapixel camera and can shoot 1080p video at 30fps. It’s also got a 2 megapixel front facing camera for self shots and video chats.

There’s a surprisingly large 2180 mAh battery packed into the handset, which should keep it going for quite a while between charges and it supports 3G, 4G LTE, NFC and Bluetooth 4.0, leaving it surprisingly feature packed for a phone that won’t break the bank.

Blackberry Q5 Release Date & Price

The BlackBerry Q5 is out now in a variety of colours (black, red, white, grey and pink) and can be purchased SIM free from around £250. That puts it in competition with the likes of the Nokia Lumia 820 and the Samsung Galaxy S3, though of course it’s the only handset in that price range to run BlackBerry 10 and one of very few that has a QWERTY keyboard, so if you care about either of those things then there’s not much in the way of competition for it.

On a 24 month contract you can get a 4G version of the BlackBerry Q5 for free from £26 a month with EE (which gives you 500 MB of data) or from £38 per month with Vodafone (netting you 2 GB of monthly data), while 3G contracts can be found from as little as £15 a month.